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Rating

4.5 Stars4.5/5

Steve Tilley, QMI Agency

Nov 19, 2014

, Last Updated: 11:02 AM ET

Your flight got delayed and you missed your connection. The hotel messed up your reservation and you had to wait three hours to get into your suite. Your room service breakfast was cold. You found a cockroach in the bathtub.

Vacation from hell? Oh, please. If you want to experience a tale that would make the TripAdvisor crowd faint in horror, step into the role of reluctant hero in Ubisoft Montreal’s first-person action epic, Far Cry 3.

When a skydiving trip to a South Pacific island paradise turns into a kidnapping nightmare for a group of American dudebros and their ladyfriends, 20-something Jason Brody finds himself on the run from Vaas, a mohawked psychopath who delights in selling tourists into slavery, or just torturing and murdering them for sick kicks.

Once Jason makes his escape from Vaas – well, his first of what will ultimately be several escapes – Far Cry 3 kicks into a familiar yet invigorating open-world game rhythm, with players free to explore the massive Rook Island archipelago, devising a plan to free Jason’s friends, liberating areas from Vaas’s forces, undertaking a dozen different types of side quests or just driving jeeps at breakneck speed through jungle foliage. Running over a tiger is Rook Island roadkill.

A first-person shooter at its core, Far Cry 3 shares some of the same design DNA as 2004’s groundbreaking Far Cry and 2008’s Far Cry 2 – a mix of the best aspects of both games, actually – although the three titles have no story connection between them.

It lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the scripted, constrained experiences found in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and allows players a huge amount of tactical freedom. Be stealthy and lay traps for the clever AI, or earn enough cash to buy a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher and a quiver full of explosive-tipped arrows and go full Rambo.

In his quest to save his friends and eliminate Vaas, Jason meets an ever-expanding roster of memorable inhabitants of Rook Island, from a helpful freedom fighter to a drugged-out doctor to a scumbag Aussie slave trader. But while Ubisoft deserves kudos for trying to frame Jason’s story as something a little deeper than “man with guns must get revenge and kill bad guys,” it’s never quite convincing.

Jason’s journey into the heart of darkness – finding his true warrior path, tumbling down the rabbit hole, insert another cliche of your choice here – is more corny than profound. Guy goes from happy-go-lucky party dude who has never shot a gun to a lethal survivalist badass proficient with every manner of weapon? Not buying it.

Far Cry 3 also suffers from the same problem that plagues nearly every open-world game: it’s tough to maintain plot tension when players are free to roam at will and ignore the main storyline. My friends have been kidnapped by a homicidal maniac, you say? Cool, just let me do some hang gliding, hunt a few Komodo dragons, search for the mummified corpses of Second World War soldiers, race jet skis and compete in challenges where I have to splatter bad guys across the hood of my jeep. I’ll get around to rescuing my buddies in a week or three. Chill, dude!

But that’s OK. In fact it’s great, because Far Cry 3 has a wonderful, organic, interconnected flow for a game with so much to see and do. Carrots are constantly dangling in front of the player’s nose: if you climb this radio tower, you’ll see where all the cool stuff is located nearby! If you clean out this enemy camp, you’ll have a safehouse at which to buy guns and equipment! If you do this medical supply run, you’ll earn enough experience to unlock a new skill! And so on and so on, until you’re saying, “OK, just one more mission and I’ll go to bed.” And then it’s 3 a.m.

By making hunting an integral part of the game – killing and skinning wild animals is necessary to craft holsters and bags to carry more weapons and gear – it forces players to constantly try new things, journey to new parts of the island and confront deadly threats that want to eat them, not shoot them. And stuff that would be time-wasting filler in most open-world games, like vehicle races and skill-testing time trials with built-in social media bragging rights, provide surprising thrills and variety.

While I’ve heard the game described as “Skyrim with guns” because of its dazzling outdoor vistas (um, wouldn’t Fallout 3 be Skyrim with guns?), Far Cry 3 is more like “Assassin’s Creed with guns, jeeps, boats, leopards, a little less stealth and no parkour.” By stripping away a lot of the slower-paced elements found in Ubisoft Montreal’s sister franchise, I daresay Far Cry 3 is consistently more satisfying.

The same can’t quite be said for the game’s co-op and competitive online modes. They’re not particularly fun or inventive, especially arriving on the heels of the finely honed online experiences found in Halo 4 and Black Ops II, and they feel like a needless extension to a game that’s already bursting with dozens of hours’ worth of solo entertainment.

Still, almost everything about Far Cry 3 speaks to the game’s skilled, confident and tightly interwoven design, and players are free to seek their specific flavour of gratification and victory as Jason becomes the most dangerous animal on the island.

So never mind the murderous psychopaths, the gun-toting maniacs, the man-eating tigers or even the cockroaches in the bathtub: this tropical paradise is a place you absolutely must visit.